Other Shores - August 2011

Wallet-restraint by US consumers has kept US import volume flat, but experts expect a rise by summer’s end when retailers build up inventories.

Will LNG shipping rates rise? At least one shipping company thinks so. It turned down a one-year charter at $125,000 a day of its newbuild LNG carrier Stena Crystal Sky, preferring a daily rate of $110,000 over only 210 days.

If you own a capesize bulker hauling iron ore from Australia to China, you have been enjoying the record rate of more than $8 per ton. 

Oil giant Shell applied to US regulators for permission to drill six wells in the Chukchi Sea. Permission was granted, perhaps because polar bears were recently re-categorized as merely “threatened” rather than “endangered.”

More than forty percent of about 600 Dutch and British mariners have personally experienced bullying, harassment, or discrimination at work within the last five years. Less than half felt they could make a complaint.

Thin Places and Hard Knocks

As usual, there were collisions and allisions: The container ships CCNI Rimac and CSAV Petorca collided at Shanghai and a fire started on the Rimac when water reacted with inflammable goods in a container. The crew was evacuated and the ship was moved outside the port while authorities looked for twenty-six of its containers that had fallen into the sea. 

Ships ran aground: While being towed to a scrapping beach at Alang, the cargo vessel Wisdom broke free and ended up in Mumbai’s Jubal Beach. After three attempts, it was freed by two powerful tugs. In Indonesia, the crew of 28 manning the bulker Sunny Partners were rescued by a tug after it ran aground while on a voyage with a cargo of bauxite. In Indonesia again, the container ship Al Rawday ran aground near the Rock Island Chain at Sambu Batam and the chief engineer had a fatal heart attack during the incident. The ship had just left Malaysia’s Port Klang.

Fires and explosions took a toll: While discharging cargo at Luanda, fire broke out on the UAL Antwerp, probably in a tank of kerosene. Due to the firefighters’ extensive efforts, the ship took on so much water that it was beached to keep it from sinking. The cooling unit on a Dutch semi-trailer burst into flame on the ro/ro ferry Schleswig-Holstein en route from Puttgarden to Rodby but a deckhand on routine patrol spotted the fire and extinguished it. The container ship APL Chiwan suffered from main-engine camshaft problems off the coast of China but they were fixed. Two days later, an engine fire disabled the ship. A tug was called for a 100-mile tow to Hong Kong while onboard generators continued to power the coolers on refrigerated containers. 

Unusual things happened: Inland sand pits often use floating dredges and the Robert R Woodington lost its cutterhead and ladder when an underwater landslide occurred. What to do? Hire a marine salvage company to recover the head, now 100 feet deep and covered by more than 70 feet of sand and clay mix. The successful recovery team included five divers, a sectional barge with a crane, and airlift and jetting equipment. At Algeciras in Spain, the 509-TEU feeder ship Deneb flopped on its starboard side at a wharf for unknown reasons. In Israel, the bulker Avramit spilled oil on the coral beach between Marina and the border of a coral reserve. The oil was quickly pumped up and the Gulf of Eilat was spared further pollution. In Rotterdam’s Caland Canal, the bunker tanker Vialis embarrassed itself by breaking in half while refueling the chemical/oil tanker Marida Mimosa. At Beirut, a shore crane unloading the Laguna collapsed across the Darya, seriously damaging that ship. Both are small cargo ships.

Humans were rescued: Although the vessel owner said there was no emergency, the master of the small tanker Pavit disagreed and used e-mail to ask for help. As a result, Falmouth Coastguard in the UK coordinated the removal of thirteen Indian crewmen off the vessel, which had been drifting for several days about 120 miles off Oman with mechanical problems and a crew growing increasingly seasick. A helicopter from the frigate HMS St Albans made 27 trips to transfer the Pavit’s crew to the Indian tanker Jag Pushpa, which agreed to repatriate the men to India. Off Long Island, a Coast Guard small boat took a sick sailor off the USS Oak Hill (LSD-51) after he was disabled by abdominal pains. In Alaska near Valdez a Coast Guard chopper took the chief engineer off the 150-foot tug Sea Voyager. He was also suffering from abdominal pains. Another Alaska-based helicopter took a fisherman off the 50-foot fishing vessel Heidi Linea. He had bad back pains from a fall on the FV. 

Gray Fleets

Thou shalt lead a pure life. The US Navy has dismissed at least 29 commanding officers in the last two years. Included were nine commanding officers for sexual harassment or inappropriate relationships in the last 18 months. Three others were dismissed for alcohol offenses and two others for personal misconduct. And the Navy is currently investigating reports of hazing on the submarine USS Tennessee. Meanwhile, in Alaska, details were released on why the commanding officer of the Coast Guard patrol boat USCGC Anacapa was relieved of his command earlier this year. He had tried to get the vessel underway while intoxicated.

Soviet warships operated openly off the Virginia coast. They were part of a two-week-long international exercise originally designed to lessen Cold War tensions. Other participating nations were France, the UK, and the US.

The British destroyer HMS Liverpool has been having an eventful tour off Libya in Operation Unified Protection. In May it was under attack by forty rockets and her 4.5-inch main gun returned fire on the rocket battery near Misrata – the first time the main guns of a British warship have been fired in anger since Iraq in 2003. Then it used its 4.5-inch gun again, this time to thwart an attempt by four Libyan boats (three rigid hulls and one small boat) to disrupt shipping in the Gulf of Sirte. At least one boat was destroyed.

The Philippines will no longer buy second-hand naval equipment from the US but might lease relatively new US equipment rather than wait for surplus material to become available. Announced object of the new policy? To make the Philippines into a strong US ally. (The Philippines still uses WW II-vintage ex-US destroyers.) That nation also rebranded the South China Sea as the West Philippine Sea, thus mimicking the US’s recent renaming of the Persian Gulf as the Arabian Gulf.

Want to buy some surplus military and naval stuff? Australia is selling up to 24 ships, 180 aircraft, 600 armored vehicles, 12,000 other vehicles, and so on. The proceeds will, hopefully, help pay for a massive $61 billion planned upgrade of the Ozzie defense forces. 

Where better way to train boarding teams than on a WW II-vintage museum steamship? Florida Coast Guardsmen used the SS American Victory as a training arena while it was moored at The American Victory Ship Mariners Memorial Museum at Tampa.

China is hell-bent on getting aircraft carriers. Photos showed concrete replicas of a carrier superstructure and a jump-jet flight deck, both far inland. The half-built ex-Soviet carrier Varyag, which a Chinese businessman bought with the announced goal of converting it into a floating casino, was taken over by the government and it will become China's first aircraft carrier. And several Chinese businessmen have put in bids for the retired British carrier Ark Royal, with the announced intentions of converting it into a floating showcase for high-technology items. (Two other ex-Soviet carriers, the Kiev and Minsk, are now parts of Chinese military theme parks.

Last year, the US Navy acquired 59,000 Chinese-made microchips, each counterfeit and each equipped with a “back door” that could allow nasty tricks such as admitting signals to shut-off the chip. 

Women will be allowed to man Royal Navy subs now that fears that fumes might affect fetuses carried by pregnant submariners have been allayed. Other nations allowing female subbies are the US, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

A Royal Navy commander failed to notify the education authority that he had separated from his wife of twenty years and thus he was able to illegally accept nearly £75,000 to send his two children to a boarding school.

It won’t help US unemployment figures shoreside but about 3,000 US Navy sailors will be released as surplus to decreasing needs. They will get no severance package and no retirement since most will not have served long enough to qualify.

White Fleets

The 122,400-ton cruise ship Celebrity Silhouette was floated-out at an inland German shipyard and needed to be taken to the North Sea Dutch port of Eemshaven for completion. The 26-mile route involved a narrow, winding river, several very tight spots with less than five feet of clearance, and passage through a railroad bridge that was too narrow for the vessel. (A crane on a barge created just enough room by removing the bridge’s center span and moving it out of the way.) And the ship had to be moved backwards. Two tugs, one at each end of the cruise ship, slowly towed the vessel with little fuss and great precision, and the voyage was safely made. Why not? The demanding routine was familiar since the Silhouette was the fourth of its class to be built at the German yard. 

Small events can cause major problems. The elderly (1952) cruise ship Philippines (ex-Augustus) had a fire in its stack while moored at Manila. The blaze was quickly quelled and an investigation revealed that the fire originated in the DC generator in the stack and was caused by someone closing ventilation flaps. That allowed heat to build up inside the funnel until ignition was reached. 

Those cruise ships that can’t fit under the Sydney Harbor Bridge have been using the one-cruise-ship berth at the Circular Quay but it really isn’t a cruise-ship terminal. Australian authorities are considering use of the nearby navy base at Garden Island even though it is busy with navy activities.

Those That Go Back and Forth

Patronage of a new East River ferry service in New York City that linked Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn (three of the City’s five boroughs) was pleasingly high because it was free. Then a ticket started costing $4 and patronage dropped to one half, Officials, however, were pleased with that number. It was higher than they had expected.

The Alaskan ferry Malaspina has a bow lookout on duty at all times. The ferry was near the eastern shore of Taiya Island and approaching Skagway when the bow lookout, in what was probably the quietest spot on the vessel, heard a faint call for help. All hands including the 45 passengers started searching the shore, a searchlight finally illuminated an injured man, and he was taken onboard. He was bleeding from multiple gashes, had two large swollen areas on his body, and was semi-conscious and dry-heaving. He also had no memory of what had happened (he probably had been hiking and had fallen down a cliff into the water and managed to pull himself ashore). When spotted, he was preparing to re-enter the water and swim toward the Malaspina.

High winds and heavy seas capsized a ferry in a bay west of Haiti’s capital and seven people went missing. The boat was transporting charcoal, bananas, and other goods to Archaie, a coastal town thirty miles northwest of Port au Prince. In Bangladesh, the Madinar Alo capsized in the Sitalakhya River and at least a dozen of more than 100 passengers died. In Indonesia ten people including two children died when their canoe sank in the Bengawan River in East Java. They were simply trying to get to their village on the other bank. At Charlotte Amalie, in the US Virgin Islands, the 89-foot fast catamaran ferry Royal Miss Belmar ran up high and dry on a rocky point. That crash injured five, including a baby, of the 102 people aboard. 

Those that carried fireworks onto a Washington State ferry around the date of the Fourth of July may have noted that explosives-sniffing dogs were active at the ferry terminal. They also learned that carrying legal fireworks onto the ferry was OK.

Legal Matters

The Chinese master of the bulker Full City is lucky and one might say he beat the current trend of criminalizing mariners for accidents. A Norwegian appeals court overturned a lower-court decision that he must serve mandatory jail time and instead substituted a suspended sentence. The second mate, also sentenced to jail, was acquitted by the appeals court. (The Full City ran aground off Telemark during a summer storm and the grounding released oil that became the worst oil spill in Norwegian history.) 

A Macedonian court jailed two men for a year because of a boating accident on Lake Ohrid in 2009 in which fifteen Bulgarian tourists died. Their offenses were allowing overcrowding and issuing false safety certificates. 

Nature

Researchers searching for the Pacific Ocean’s proverbial Great Garbage Patch of floating plastic, a patch reported as being twice the size of Texas and somewhere between California and Japan, found it hard to find and far less dense than reported. Scientists often could not see much plastic from the deck of their research vessel. “The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial but the patch is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size,” reported one scientist. And the patch is not growing exponentially, as was earlier reported.

In New Zealand, a young humpback whale swam into a Tory Channel mussel-farming operation and became so entangled that it became exhausted. The mussel-farmers moved a barge alongside the whale and it was utterly passive during the 45 minutes it took to cut the whale free with the help of a crane on the barge.

A massive underwater landslide 200 miles off Cornwall caused a minor but measurable tsunami along the UK’s south coast. Wave heights were measured as being between 05 and 0.8 meters.

The North Atlantic island of Rockall is exceedingly unattractive to most people, being 82-feet wide, 101-feet long, and 68-feet high and 187 miles from the nearest land, and the highest waves in the world (95 feet) were measured nearby. Nevertheless, a Yorkshireman plans to spend a night on the island to replace a brass plaque left there in 1955 and re-establish Britain’s ownership of the island. (There is a four-way dispute between the UK, Ireland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands over ownership.) By the way, his name is Strangeway.

Metal Bashing

The 1960-built tanker Wenjiang was launched as the British Curlew for BP Tanker Co. It was shelled and abandoned in 1980 during the Iran/Iraq war while at Basrah. Apparently it stayed afloat and managed to end up Bandar Abbas in Iran. Someone decided that nobody really owned the tanker, took over ownership, a tug appeared, and the tow headed for Pakistan and scrapping. The real owners are unhappy.

China’s largest shipyard will expand into green recycling by erecting the world’s largest dismantling facility. It should be capable of dismantling about 75 ships a year that range in size from about 50,000 dwt to a VLCC-like 300,000 dwt.

Nasties and Territorial Imperatives

Due to the monsoon season, Somali pirates left open waters and concentrated their activities in the southern Red Sea and off the coast of Oman. Somali fishermen reminded everyone that they too carry AK-47s but just for self-defense against the real pirates. (If a fishing skiff’s equipment includes a boarding ladder and several RPG’s, it’s probably a pirate vessel.) And Somali pirates did something unusual: they rescued nineteen crewmembers from the cargo vessel Orna after it caught fire. No word whether they were held for ransom.

Odd Bits

Prince William and his new bride visited Canada and their progression has been much more sedate than the last time Canada was visited (in 1786) by another Royal Navy officer and heir to the throne with the name of William. That William, later King William IV, could be a rousterer (his several visits to Halifax while a junior officer are still prominent parts of local history) and he fathered several illegitimate children, including ten by one actress/mistress. (He would have married her but descendants of George II were forbidden to marry unless they obtained the reigning monarch's consent.)

Last summer, Canadian government searchers discovered the Arctic exploration ship HMS Investigator, which sank in 1854 off Banks Island. This summer, the same people hope to find HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, the heart of Sir John Franklin’s abortive 1854 expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. The vessels are Canada’s only national historic sites with no known location. Noted one searcher, Even if they are not found, “next time the team will know where not to look.”

A major problem for shipping companies and port operators is that shippers too often mislabel the weight or contents of containers, and that practice has resulted in a number of accidents. (When the MSC Napoli was grounded, it was found that the declared weights for 137 of the 600 shipping containers on its deck differed from actual weights by more than three tons.) The major shipping companies are organizing a Cargo Incident Notifications Network called Cinsnet (perhaps it would be better labeled as Sinsnet?) to help identify both potentially dangerous containers and industry-wide trends.

The following may tell readers something about the so-called “warrior complex.” The Navy SEALS that killed Osama bin Laden referred to him as “Geronimo” while those insiders at the Pentagon and the CIA preferred “Cakebread.”

Coal from Indonesia has been catching fire while being carried to China so one insurance company issued a simple checklist. Coals are ranked from anthracite, bituminous, and sub-bituminous down to lignite (aka brown coal). Indonesia mostly exports the lower-ranked coals, which tend to self-ignite. Shipments often have a high moisture content, which is a no-no. 

Upon hearing an electronic emergency signal one night, British coastguard authorities launched a lifeboat and searched for three hours some four miles off the Welsh coast before it was realized that the signal had been transmitted by a standard electronic device in a BMW parked on the ferry European Endeavour inbound from Dublin. This Emergency Telematics anti-theft, send-help device is fitted to many new BMW and Volvo vehicles.

Per international agreement, the longer a vessel, the lower must be the pitch of its horn. If longer than 200 meters, its horn must issue a sound between 70 and 200 Hertz. For lengths between 75 and 200 meters, the sound should be between 130 and 350 Hz, and between 20 and 75 meters, the pitch must be an almost squeaky 250-700 Hz. (To establish a baseline here, A above middle C is normally 440 Hz but is sometimes set at 432 Hz for a “warmer” orchestral tone.)

Head-Shakers

Since many persons refuse to believe the US Government’s announcement that Osama Bin Laden is dead, an underseas explorer and treasure hunter will search for the body and, if successful, he announced he will obtain DNA and other evidence.